When darkness met light

Lucy Partington was 21 when she disappeared. For two decades, her family desperately hoped she was living elsewhere, under a new name. Then the world learned that she had been murdered by Frederick West. In the final exclusive extract from his memoir Experience, Martin Amis remembers his gentle, artistic cousin; and describes the agony of failed marriages - his father's and his own

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise. Or with an animal. I keep thinking that if I could only shift my head an inch and change its angle, then I would see her fully. Just as Marian, her sister, a year my senior, was magnified in my mind, so Lucy, two and a half years younger, was additionally reduced. Only their brother David did I see four-square... In my clearest image of her she is crossing the small courtyard between the stable and the house, looking downwards and smiling secretively, privately, as if sharing a joke with the mouse I knew she had in her pocket. Some people, alas, live and die without trace. They come and they go and they leave no trace. This, at least, was not Lucy's destiny.

On the night of December 27 1973, Lucy Partington, who was staying with her mother in Gloucestershire, was driven into Cheltenham to visit an old friend, Helen Render. Lucy and Helen spent the evening talking about their future; they put together a letter of application to the Courtauld Institute in London, where Lucy hoped to continue studying medieval art. They parted at 10.15. It was a three-minute walk to the bus stop. She never posted the letter and she never boarded the bus. She was 21. And it was another 21 years before the world found out what happened to her.

At certain times, for certain periods, David was able to persuade himself that Lucy was still alive - alive, but elsewhere. Naturally all the Partingtons attempted something of the kind. My mother, too, attempted it. I attempted it. Lucy was serious, resolute, artistic, musical and religious. Even when we were children, the message I always took away from Lucy was that she wasn't going to be deflected, she wasn't going to be deterred.

Only with difficulty could you imagine her having the inclination to vanish; but it was the work of a moment to imagine her having the will. So she was in a nunnery, somewhere; she was a violinist in Melbourne, a pseudonymous poet in Montreal. Of course, these reveries kept running up against an obstacle: the fact that Lucy was gentle, was kind, was sane. To which the one available rejoinder would be: well, I must have been wrong about that, and I suppose it can deeply surprise you, the people who turn out to be prepared to disseminate hurt. Thus the argument continued (very faintly after a while, and then almost inaudibly, given my distance from the event) for 21 years.

In early March 1994, I had been abroad and knew nothing until I opened a newspaper in the taxi from Heathrow. There was the photograph I had last seen on a missing persons poster 20 years ago. David would later tell me that the moment he heard about the exhumations in Gloucester, he knew that Lucy would be among the dead.

She had been abducted by one of the most prolific murderers in British history, Frederick West. We knew what had happened to her after death. She was decapitated and dismembered, and her remains were crammed into a shaft between leaking sewage pipes, along with a knife, a rope, a section of masking tape, and two hairgrips.

But the terrible imponderable was what had happened to her when she was still alive. Records showed that just after midnight on the morning of January 3 1974, West appeared at the casualty department of Gloucester Royal Hospital with a serious laceration to the right hand. "It seems only too possible that she was kept alive for several days," writes one commentator. And yet the evidence remains entirely circumstantial. "It is possible," writes another, "that [West's] wound occurred as a result of the dismemberment of a corpse, but it is just as possible that it did not, which is the inference I should prefer the family to make."

From the moment Lucy's fate became public knowledge, David had needed to nerve himself to open a newspaper. Because it was all ready to begin again: waking in the middle of the night and getting up to sit for hours weeping and swearing. This was his condition on the day after the disappearance. "Lucy didn't come home last night." There was nobody in her room and the made bed had not been slept in. There was certainty of disaster. And there was my poor cousin (I hate thinking about this), out in the courtyard, crying and raising his clenched fists and saying: "If anyone has done anything to her..."

It was David who drove Lucy into Cheltenham on December 27 1973.

- I could so easily have driven her back. I offered to.

But Lucy had decided to take the bus; and there was no point in arguing with her about a thing like that.

- If I had insisted...

- You could go on for ever, I said, with this chain of ifs... As you drove into town, do you remember what you talked about?

- I was trying to justify my current girlfriend, who was - you know, sexy, but thick. Lucy was being very accommodating. Not at all critical. But I still felt I had to justify myself.

- Six years after she disappeared - remember? When we talked about it. You were saying that you wanted to avenge her. With your own hands. Do you still?

- No. But now, or at any other stage, I would give up my life so that Lucy could have hers. Because my life is... And hers...

- I understand. But don't be hard on yourself. I think you're a paragon.

- Me?

I told David, - I've read all the books, and there's no hard evidence that it wasn't all over there and then at the bus stop. And I added, hoping to give comfort (but why would this give comfort?), - Lucy was just very unlucky, David. Your sister was just incredibly unlucky.

Like well over 100 other souls, we converged on the Religious Society of Friends Meeting House, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, to attend a memorial gathering for Lucy Katherine Partington, 1952-1973. The funeral itself had been postponed because Lucy's remains were still being held as evidence by the police.

This was Elizabeth Webster, a teacher at the Arts Centre:

"...She came to see me when she was at Exeter, just before the last year, and I said to her, 'Now that you are grown-up, what are you going to do?' and she said, 'I don't mind what I do, as long as I do it absolutely to the hilt.' And then I said, 'Yes, that's fine, but where are you going?' and she thought awfully hard, then she said, 'Towards the light... Towards the light.'"

I never again want to hear anyone ask me how Lucy Partington got "drawn into" the orbit of the Wests. West said he killed my cousin because she wanted him to go and meet her parents. He and Lucy were having an affair ("purely sex, end of story"), and Lucy, now pregnant, had "come the loving racket" and "said I wanna come and live with you and all this crap, and I just grabbed her by the throat". "[H]er wanted me to see her parents, her wanted me to do bloody everything."

That is what it said, in the press, unchallenged. I rebut it. This book rebuts it.

Everything about her, even her name, pointed towards the light. Given this, I cannot find order or meaning in a darkness so deep and durable. The death of Lucy Partington represents a fantastic collision (collide: "from col- 'together' + laedere 'to strike'"). It is what happens when darkness meets light, when experience meets innocence, when the false meets the true, when utter godlessness meets purity of spirit, when this -

Hi May it your Dad Writeing to you. or lette me have your telephone number... or Write to me as soon as you can, please may I have to sort out watt Mr Ogden did to me, my new solicitors are Brilliant I Read What you sead about me in News of the that was loylty you read what Scott canavan sead he had -

meets this -

things are as big as you make them - I can fill a whole body, a whole day of life with worry about a few words on one scrap of paper; yet, the same evening, looking up, can frame my fingers to fit the sky in my cupped hands.

Sweethearts and sacrificed empires

As a child, my parents' marriage, I believed, loomed like a translucent horizon - a belief memorably reaffirmed by my father in Deya, Majorca, where (late at night, admittedly) he had said to my brother and me: Never doubt that I love your mother. Never doubt that we will always be together... And I didn't doubt it.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for. Because the Other Woman has made you cautious about love: she herself has created caution in you about love. However this may be, I got very close to loving Jane. "I'm your wicked stepmother," said Jane, after the wedding. And she was my wicked stepmother - but only in the sense meant by my son, Louis, when he tells me (for instance) that he is "wicked at Latin".

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you. And she worked on this little vice, and overcame it.

The day I finished reading my father's 1978 novel Jake's Thing, I went over to the house in Hampstead. When Jane left the room I said,

- All that sex therapy stuff. Did you really do any of that?

I knew something about my father's sex life. One source was Jane, who even in 1975 was telling me more about my father's growing remissness in that area than I really wanted to know. Another source was Jake's Thing.

- Yes!

- Christ! That genital-focusing stuff and going to bed with a ring round your cock?

- Yes! Some of it.

- Christ!

- Well, in a case like this you have to show willing...

- Yeah, but the novel didn't show willing, did it?

And he gave me that look. Incapacitated: gently incapacitated.

[Elizabeth Jane Howard left Kingsley in 1980. He moved in with Hilly, his first wife, and her husband Alastair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock. The arrangement lasted until Kingsley's death in 1995.]

To the end of his life, Kingsley maintained the following: "the idea was" that he would have his holiday with Jane, and then return to the family (and then go on seeing her as often as he could).

"It's only half a life without a woman," he said to me, later; the woman, the wife, the other half, was gone - and no successor would be sought. My father never again kissed a woman with passion. This from a man who used to live for adultery...

When my parents' marriage broke up, in the 60s, the newspapers covered it. And when my marriage broke up, 30 years later, the newspapers covered it (with noticeable differences in the journalistic approach). When my father had his teeth fixed, in the 60s, the newspapers didn't cover it. And when I had my teeth fixed, 30 years later, the newspapers covered it. My teeth made headlines. But let me tell you something about experience. It outstrips all accounts of it - all ulterior versions. A man having a full scale epileptic fit on the street corner does not mind about the tittering of nearby children. He is involved in his own triage.

In 1993, over dinner, my father said,

- Say as little as you want or as much as you want.

And I told him about my recent visit to Cape Cod to see my children, and their mother - to whom I had become a stranger, from whom I was estranged. The boys sensed that there was a possibility of reconciliation. On the first morning, Jacob pushed my coffee cup an inch nearer my right hand and said, "Enjoying your stay so far?"...

Five days later, as I prepared to leave, the pond outside the house was obediently reflecting the mass of doom stacked up in the sky. My sons were constructing a miniature zoo on a patch of grass; Louis showed me the little stunt where you dropped a coin down a complicated tunnel and were then issued with your ticket of admission. But I wasn't staying, and they knew it. They knew I was leaving. They knew the thing had failed - the whole thing had failed. I said goodbye and climbed into the rented car.

- I just can't stop thinking about it. I just can't get it out of my mind.

- There's nothing you can do with things like that. You can only hope to coexist with them. They never go away. They're always with you. They're just - there...

Yes, always available for delectation, and always undiminished in their power. On the night flight back to London, I performed what seemed to me to be the extraordinary feat of shedding tears throughout the full six hours, even during the shallow sleep I kept snapping out of. I wondered about the physiology of weeping: questions of storage and supply. In my delirium, I was vexed by the parenthetical thought that there was an indicator flashing in the cockpit, something like the watering can symbol on the dashboard of a car, telling me that I had at last used up all my spray.

In leaving home, I did what I did for love. But how does it look, the love ledger, by the time you're done? Because you are also the enemy of love and - for your children - its despoiler. "I hate love," said my son Louis at the age of five or six (he was complaining about the love interest in a book we were reading). He didn't mean that, but he could now say: "I no longer trust it."

When Dryden retold the story of Antony and Cleopatra, he called his tragedy All For Love (or The World Well Lost). Those stupendous sweethearts sacrificed empires, but they were certain that love, the primary value, was being exalted even in their defeats and their suicides. I envy them the flourish. We who absent ourselves from the daily company of our children must reckon it differently. Love comes out of it with gains but also with losses. And whenever death is losing, the force of death makes gains. Divorce: the incredibly violent thing. What parent, involved in it, has not wished for the death of the once-loved one? This is universal. And this is why your heart feels gangrenous inside your chest. This is why (as I put it to myself) you want men in white to come and take you away and wash your blood.

"Stopping being married to someone," my father had written, 10 years earlier, "is an incredibly violent thing to happen to you, not easy to take in completely, ever." He knew I was now absorbing the truth and the force of this. And he knew also that the process could not be softened or hastened. All you could do was survive it. That surviving was a possibility he showed me, by example. But he did more. He roused himself and did more. "Talk as much as you want about it or as little as you want." These words sounded like civilisation to me, in my barbarous state, so dishevelled in body and mind.

Talk as much or as little... I talked much. Only to him could I confess how terrible I felt, how physically terrible, bemused, subnormalised, stupefied from within, and always about to flinch or tremble from the effort of making my face look honest, kind, sane. Only to him could I talk about what I was doing to my children. Because he had done it to me.